So many people in this world are blind followers.
There’s nothing more dangerous than collective thought.
If you measure everybody’s intelligence, individually, as a whole they’d average out to the mean intelligence level, obviously. That’s just a mathematical certainty. But, study the people collectively as a group and their intelligence lowers significantly. Most people are sheep and follow the herd rather than acting alone.
A herd with no leader amounts to nothing more than a flock of inept pigeons. Rather than flying south for the winter, they all fly sporadically in conflicting directions, eventually freezing to death because nobody took charge.
I don’t consider myself to be “enlightened,” or anything like that. I do consider, however, that leaderless groups of people are incredibly inefficient.
I was waiting to take a class the other day. Standing outside the lecture hall with about 20 other people before class started, the door was locked. When the class before us had finally gotten out, all 20 of us proceeded inside. With 10 minutes before class was scheduled to start, about 180 people had yet to show up.
I took a seat towards the back of the lecture hall, which provided me with more legroom (I have “daddy longlegs”). Every 10 or so seconds, the student in the front of the class stood up to open the door for students who were knocking at the locked door. He never unlocked the door, so every time it closed, it locked again.
I watched him stand up, walk over, and open the door for 3 separate groups of people over the course of 30 seconds, sitting back down at every 10-second interval, only to stand back up almost immediately.
Nope. I was not having any part of this.
I stood up, walked to the floor of the lecture hall, squared up to the door, and propped it open with a chair.
Just like that, students could enter the classroom without knocking on a locked door, which made us all look like stooges.
Had I not intervened, students would have continued getting up to open the door every 10 seconds.
As I walked back to my seat, all the students already in the class suddenly got really quiet, staring at me with a look which basically said, “on whose authority are you allowed to prop that door open?” I shot back a look of disgust at all of them, which basically said, “I’m a grown man whose decisions won’t be made by your sheepish collective thought.”
At this, they all resumed their jib-jab with each other… and that was that.
Believe me, I didn’t do this because I felt bad for the kid that kept getting up to open the door.
No.
I did this because I was embarrassed that not a single student took the initiative to prop the door open. It’s not rocket science. I was truly embarrassed to be part of such an inefficient group of people.
I had to take a stand.
Now the class considers me to be the Alpha, a title that I’ve accepted, yet all I did was prop a door open.
Strong leaders represent strong people.
Until next time,
Michael J. Erickson, CEO & Co-Founder
